"Peter Singer’s ideas aren’t just a threat to society; they endanger the very existence of ethics and ethical behavior. At least this is how Susan Lufkin Kranz sees it. Singer’s thinking “is clearly an affront to our common humanity” (xiv). “Singer is not just aiming to overthrow traditional ethics; he is undermining ethics itself” (13). Adopting Singer’s ethical viewpoint would “spell the death of ethics and of every human value” (15). Singer is threatening specifically because of his theory of moral status. A theory of moral status outlines which entities we have duties towards and which entities we don’t. Singer thinks that no special status comes from being a member of the human species. What makes an entity important is sentience, the capacity to feel pleasure and pain and form preferences. This means that many nonhuman animals, such as chimpanzees, dogs, and cats, are morally significant. Some humans, on the other hand, such as fetuses and humans in a persistent vegetative state, are not. Most controversially, this means that infants with anencephaly, a developmental disorder where the child is born with just a brain stem and no mid-brain or higher brain, have absolutely no intrinsic moral status. If the parents consented, they can be used as a source of organs for transplant, even though they are not dead. Hence the shocking aspect of Singer’s beliefs: it is wrong to eat a cow, but it is sometimes ok to kill a baby. For Kranz, the claim that being a member of the human species does not bring moral status is beyond the pale of legitimate ethical systems: “Either humanity will retain its central position in the ethical universe, or else human ethics will come to an end and the values of the marketplace or some other horror will fill the vacuum” (15)."
- Refuting Peter Singer's Ethical Theory
The Importance of Human
Dignity
by Susan Lufkin Kranz
Praeger, 2001
Review by Rob Loftis,
Ph.D.
Jul 15th 2002 (Volume 6, Issue 29)